If you know us, you know we like to introduce cutting edge projects, even in the rendering stage. But we also like to follow up on completion, too, and there's nothing better than seeing a finished project. Take for instance this 1940s Cape Cod home in St. Paul that was converted into a modern, green home. We mentioned it back in April of last year and now look at it. It's ultra stylish and so green! EcoDEEP is using the home as their offices, too, so potential clients get to see and experience first-hand what a green home feels like.

The Galleries at Turney, although completed back in mid-2007, have been getting some good press over the last year for good reason. First, they're ultra modern, super slick, and hard to miss. Second, the eight homes were the first to receive LEED-H certification in the entire state of Arizona. Third, all eight detached units, as of about December 2008, have sold out. They're gone, which means smartly designed, modern, somewhat luxurious homes can sell, even in a tough real estate market.

We have four DVDs of this movie to randomly giveaway to commenters below, so if you'd like to win one, make sure to say something before midnight on Friday, January 16, 2009.*

Finally! A full-length feature for all us green building junkies! The Greening of Southie is an award-winning film that documents the journey of a green condo building from the idea of a legacy Boston developer all the way to the jungles of Bolivia, from the steel mills of New England to LEED Gold certification. The Macallen Building Condominiums, a sexy piece of contemporary architecture on the border of Boston and South Boston, was completed in 2007 by a committed team of builders. They submitted their process to scrutiny via the cameras of budding filmmakers Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis of Wicked Delicate Films.

More and more, we're seeing designs that focus on energy efficiency and near zero energy operations. One company that has such designs is Solar Village, and they're offering Turn-Key Solar Village Homes — something that I find to be very interesting. The homes feature passive solar design, foil faced rigid foam and Icynene insulation, fiberglass windows with low-E glass, healthy indoor air, a solar hot water system, a 2.5 kW solar pv system with online monitoring, and super efficient HVAC system. As a result, the homes are close to zero energy, if not net-zero energy, and they can be built in less than three months!

When a friend first shot me a link to an article about this i-house, I knew we had to feature it. This is a new, modern, green home designed and soon-to-be offered by Clayton Homes, the largest manufacturer of manufactured housing in the U.S. Clayton Homes started in 1934, smack dab in the tough years of the Great Depression, and since that time, they've sold ~1.5 million homes. If everything goes as planned with the i-house, Clayton Homes would like to be selling 2000 i-houses per year within 18 months of launching sales in May or so of this year.

About a year ago, we showed some renderings of Orchid Street Cityhomes, and it turns out, the homes are now finished. Matter of fact, they’ve won a Root Award in Portland Spaces‘ inaugural design competition. Well deserved, I believe. Orchid Cityhomes is a duplex, or connected rowhouses, but the party wall is the garage, so the homes maintain a level of privacy and separation that’s usually missing in most attached residences. They were designed and developed by Building Arts Workshop and both dwellings just received LEED Platinum certification about a week before Christmas. Some of the green amenities include: